- World premiere of the new heat treatment systems- Complete supply chain - Low energy consumption and low emission- Green Foundry with new standard of safety, flexibility and cost benefit

Leading manufacturer of industrial furnaces StrikoWestofen opens new business unit of the heat treatment for casting aluminium parts with an experienced team.

With this new expansion, the StrikoWestofen Group (Gummersbach, Germany) is able to immediately offer its customers the heat treatment systems and product carriers for casting aluminium parts – particularly structural casting parts. This is in the wake of the Group’s recent acquisition of BPR-Engineering GmbH from Rheda-Wiedenbrück. With the company’s full team joining in StrikoWestofen Group, Frank Herkenräder, the founder of the BPR-Engineering, with 20 years of expertise of heat treatment in casting aluminate parts, and his team will form the basis of the new StrikoWestofen business unit “Heat Treatment”. This is a strategic answer of the global market leader in the field of dosing and melting furnaces for the light metal industry to the growing trend towards using heat treatment to optimize casting aluminium parts’ mechanical properties.

This acquisition also provides the Group immediate core competence and 20 years of know-how in heat treatment. “The agreement with the employees of BPR-Engineering GmbH was less a takeover in the classical sense and more a buying-in of know-how,” explains Rudi Riedel, CEO of the StrikoWestofen Group. With their know-how, the 18 new employees in this business unit can cover the entire range from the development and projecting of hardware and software to the commissioning and approval of the systems.

Tailor-made to meet customer needs on low energy consumption and low emission, high quality, safety and flexibility The new Heat Treatment business unit pursues a holistic approach: furnaces, quenching systems and product carriers together are not seen as individual components of a system but as an overall concept. This allows enormous cost savings due to even heat distribution and low energy consumption. Also, the components are less susceptible to distortions, which reduces the necessary alignment work. “That saves production cost too,” points out Frank Herkenräder, head of the new Heat Treatment business unit. “For one of our customers, the optimized concept reduced 80 percept of the alignment work which meant savings of approx. 3 million euros in two years.”

The available systems cover all phases of the heat treatment process. In four-storey continuous furnace systems, up to three different types of cast parts can be heat-treated simultaneously. The modular systems also make it possible for flexibility and scalability according to customer needs. The same is true for the chamber furnace systems, which are especially suitable for the heat treatment of smaller numbers of pieces or of frequently changing ranges of parts. They consist of four to 22 furnaces, each of which can run a recipe of its own in parallel.

In addition, StrikoWestofen is the technology trailblazer with regard to combined air-water quenching systems for especially high-quality casting parts. Product carriers adapted to the components are made of a particularly heat-resistant stainless steel alloy to complete the portfolio. Here’s how Rainer Erdmann, Managing Director of StrikoWestofen Asia sums up the situation: “It was a logical step for us to expand our core competencies by adding the Heat Treatment business unit. With Frank Herkenräder and his team, we have found a company which shares our philosophy. In the future, our mission will be still to offer the most technically advanced, most sustainable and most economical furnaces on the market, to facilitate the transformation and upgrade of traditional Chinese foundry industry amid the ‘New Normal’ environment. ”